Electronic mail (e-mail) applications such as Microsoft® Outlook™ and Entourage™, Netscape® Messenger™, Eudora™, Pegasus™ and Oracle™ Email enable users to set an auto-reply that automatically replies to incoming messages with a customized text message. This automatic reply feature is known in MS Outlook as “Out of Office Assistant”, in Netscape Messenger as “Vacation Message”. In Eudora, MS Entourage, Pegasus Mail and Oracle Email, it is simply known as “auto-reply”.
Typically, the auto-reply feature enables a user to type and save a brief auto-reply message that will then be automatically sent in reply to all incoming messages or to a subset of those incoming messages based on user-determined rules. The usual custom is for the user to indicate that he or she is away from the office until a certain date, to specify at least one alternate contact, and to provide phone, fax, email and/or other contact information for the alternate contact.
However, there are a number of shortcomings with this current technology. First, if the auto-reply is only sent once and the desired recipient of the original message is away for a long period of time, others may forget they received the auto-reply and wonder why they are still not receiving a reply from the recipient. Second, time is wasted when a message is sent to a person who is unavailable because the sender only learns that the intended recipient is unavailable upon receipt of the auto-reply. Further time is wasted because the sender has to then forward the original message to one or more of the alternate contacts. Third, work may be duplicated unnecessarily if the original recipient later reads the message and is unaware that his alternate contacts are already dealing with the matter that was the subject of the original message. These problems are particularly noticeable in modern work environments where employees are not necessarily working at their desk, but rather are increasingly mobile, using wireless-enabled PDAs and cell phones to communicate while they work from remote locations.
Accordingly, it would be highly desirable to provide a system and method for overcoming some of these deficiencies.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.